Presenter: Seth Dougherty - Donegal
Time: 10:30 - 11:15
Room: Lab B
Contact: sedougherty@donegal.k12.pa.us

Description of Presentation
This presentation is meant to be a look inside how my chemistry classroom functions as I have tried to eliminate as much paper as I can over the last two years. The main vehicle of this switch is the virtual world of Moodle. I will show how assignments, discussions, assessments and other areas of my teaching are being streamlined, hopefully, using this tool.

My Moodle: manila.donegal.k12.pa.us

Notes from the Session

BENEFITS of Moodle
Seth’s classes open to guests
· Used by parents
· Can be blocked
Organization – can put everything in folders if you wish; can organize course thematically, chronologically
Eliminates printing (and losing) papers
Activity Reports - Monitors student’s use – shows where they have been in, how much time they have spent in each activity
Moodle modules and plug-ins; if a district has their own Moodle, it can be customized to teachers’ needs

LIMITATIONS
· Students who have little experience using computers have initial problems
· Email accounts required to create a Moodle account (but faux addresses will be accepted)

ACTIVITIES
· Assignments
  • Enable/disable due date dependency
  • Teacher submission page allows a view of all submitted assignments, time and date
  • Can grade and comment on submissions
· Databases – use to store previous projects
· Quizzes – putting them in manually is time consuming; importing from Examview is more efficient, but still a bit challenging (contact Seth for more information)
  • Results shows score for each answer
  • Can manually override grades (for example – to give partial credit)
  • Can use essay feature if you want students to show their work (essays are manually graded)
· Links to documents, presentations, Webpages, files (video or audio)
· Events calendar – useful to students and parents
· Help line – student enters questions, comments